


13 Ways of Looking at the Lovers

by Thimblerig



Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, Awkward Conversations, Consensual Infidelity, F/F, Fairy Tale Elements, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Torture, Past Relationship(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-11
Updated: 2018-10-14
Packaged: 2019-07-29 16:25:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16267970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thimblerig/pseuds/Thimblerig
Summary: It’s mostly business the first time...A scattering of moments, between a Queen and a spy who happens to love her.**This is a companion story to Anathema Device's “If tomorrow wasn't such a long time”, written as a late birthday present.





	1. The Princess and the Crow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Anathema Device (notowned)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/notowned/gifts).
  * Inspired by [If tomorrow wasn't such a long time](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13650624) by [Anathema Device (notowned)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/notowned/pseuds/Anathema%20Device). 



> // You should be able to read this without looking through "If tomorrow..." but it's, you know, a good story, so.
> 
> // The torture and noncon are non-explicit in both stories but the aftermath is fairly extensive.
> 
> // I adapted the title and the format from Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” (www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45236/thirteen-ways-of-looking-at-a-blackbird)

i

Queen is always the big spoon.  
  
In the darkness after midnight Anne doesn’t know what to make of that, lying still and sweaty and quite thoroughly shagged between Queen’s fine cotton sheets, with the woman’s small breasts pressed into her shoulder blades and her dainty snores tickling the back of her neck. Her slender arm folds around the cage of her ribs as if to guard from nightmares.  
  
The bed is too soft, she thinks: it’s hell on her back.

 

ii

Consider this: a princess beguiled by a monstrous crow.  
  
_Trip trip,_ her feet on the garden flagstones. _Slush slush,_ her footsteps in the unwritten snow.  
  
Dark the trees that scatter on the edge of the wood: black against the green-grey clouds, the white snow. The princess’s pale hair swings loose about her green-cloaked shoulders and the cold calls red to her cheeks, the sharp tip of her nose.  
  
_Am I not beautiful?_ asks the crow. She displays wings shining green-black, holds them flared like a dancer's fans. _Come with me,_ she commands, beckoning into the forest. _Come with me and I will tell you secrets._  
  
They are alone: the princess, the crow, the snow, the trees.  
  
_Yes,_ she says, and her eyes shine like moons. _Yes, you are beautiful._

  
  
iii  
  
It’s mostly business the first time.  
  
Anne is attending a conference on the Mind-Body Interface, keeping her medical skills current, her public persona known, when she encounters by chance Ana Queen.

Queen does not seem like she could run anything, a slip of a girl in a crisp-ironed flannel shirt with pale hair caught back with a clip, she looks like somebody’s intern, not co-founder of a security firm.  
  
Athos works for her.  
  
It’s mostly business, then, that has _Anne_ seduce _Ana_ that night at one of the conference mixers, with a green-black sequined dress and a roguish wink. Information, leverage, are as useful in intelligence as they are in medicine.  
  
And it’s _fun._  
  
**  
  
“I never talk shop with my lovers,” Queen says innocently, eyes wide and head cradled on a cotton-covered pillow. “I hope that's alright.”  
  
Anne arches one eyebrow, the swags of her unpinned hair falling over her bare shoulder. Through the thin hotel wall a party of revellers drink the night down, shrieking with disordered laughter.  
  
"What if talking shop is… _fun,_ for me?” Anne purrs, making a joke of it.  
  
Queen smiles and shakes her head. She twines fingers in Anne’s black-scented hair and draws her down.  
  
  
iv  
  
A witch in the wood keeps a house under an oak tree. Every night her little round windows glow like warm amber between the ancient tree roots. Every night she opens the moss-covered door and lets the smells of cooking, and of drying flowers, go out into darkness.  
  
Every night a wolf-bitch comes a claw-length closer.

 

v  
  
It's a winter night in Paris and Anne walks along the icy street, enjoying the chill wind striking colour out of her cheeks and toying with hair loose under a beret. Her coat is warm, her fashionable boots sturdy: she smiles at the white snow crushed underfoot and the icicles on the black spiked fence.

She hears Queen’s voice around the corner, and a light tenor, which her razor memory soon assigns as one of her ex-husband’s henchmen.

 _“...  delivered as requested and required,”_ d’Herblay trills, low and charming, _“hand-carried, guarded, and, if needed, carried forth on the snow-bright wings of Pegasus.”_

 _“Thank you, Aramis.”_ Anne can hear the laughter in her lover’s voice. _“Some hot chocolate for you both against the night.”_

 _“Oh, please,”_ a woman says: young, a slightly coarse accent colouring her musical voice. Anne would guess it's Bonacieux, the Garrison’s new tech support.

 _“With spice?”_ D’Herblay’s voice is fervent: _“Thank you, thank you, Majestrix...”_

Bonacieux: _“Will you drink it with us?”_

 _“No,”_ Queen answers, with a smile in her voice. _“For I've a friend soon to call.”_

Bonacieux squeaks. D’Herblay laughs, low and warm. _“Say no more, Lady, we'll make ourselves scarce -”_

His voice breaks as Anne, never one to miss a cue, steps around the corner.

All expression and charm slips off the Garrison operator’s face; he shifts, his balance adapting to a subtle fighting stance to wound or protect as events call for. The Hello Kitty thermos in Bonacieux’s trembling hands steams as she unscrews the lid ready to throw the contents, clever girl. Queen stands motionless, poised, at the steps to her building, light and ethereal, the silver handcuff attached to her document case catching scatterlight from passing traffic. “Anne,” she says, smiling.

“Do you know who this is?” d’Herblay asks, intent as a hunting dog.

“I do.”

He licks his lips. “There is a risk -” he tries.

“That will be all, d’Herblay.” He acknowledges defeat with a slight bow and a backwards step. Bonacieux’s round eyes move back and forth between them as Anne steps forward, settling her hand on Queen’s narrow hip.

“Don't worry,” she purrs to Queen’s employees over the woman’s shoulder, “reading other people's mail is beneath me.” She dips her head to taste Queen’s delicious neck and smiles at the twist in their mouths, the stiffness in their backs as they walk away.

  
vi

Variously, these: a storm come to shelter in a cherry tree; two women weary of the world outside; a very good fuck.

 _I can leave any time I like,_ snarls the storm.

They find spaces for themselves scattered over the years, between the locked rooms of Anne’s past and Ana’s husband, his not-so-secret liaisons with Charlotte von Mellendorf and a line of pretty young men;  _Athos._ Little as children interest her, Anne receives dispatches of Ana’s son with patient attention. Young Louis is as little a part of Anne’s world as his father but he _matters_ to Ana, and so Anne listens.

Winter loves spring and Anne does not know what to think of that. So she doesn't, performing her solo missions for the DGSE and others, her legitimate medical consulting, all with clinical precision and formidable efficiency.

She's good, the best.

Russia isn't her fault.

 


	2. Russia

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // I'm sorry about the anachronic order, folks, the story didn't want to go in a logical way. (Sections are numbered by time, if that might help.)
> 
> // the dialogue in ix, with a slight edit for clarity, comes from “If tomorrow wasn't such a long time”. Its POV is my own.
> 
> // I'm assuming for the sake of this story that Anne had some awareness of Ana Queen's past fling with Aramis, even if they didn't talk about it.

ix

After the rescue from Russia, halfway home with a Stockholm ambulance’s sirens fading as it leaves the airfield, Athos demands, “Why were they trying to get you back?”  
  
Anne shrugs, exhaustion and constant pain eating at her patience. “Who knows why the Russians do half the things they do?”  
  
He crowds up in her face, using all his mass, his weight of menace. She stares back, unblinking. “If d'Artagnan dies because of some damn game of yours, I’ll kill you with my bare hands,” he growls.  
  
“I’m not playing a game, you fool. Do you really think I let them torture me for four days for fun?”  
  
“Did they? Did they really torture you or is this all cosmetic?”

She shakes her head and walks away. D’Artagnan, casualty of her rescue, will be down for months, assuming he doesn't just die - something else on Anne’s account, not so? There is a trace of the young Gascon's blood on her wrist like a smear of lipstick, splashed past where the medical gloves ended and missed by her rapid clean-up. It's all disgusting, _louche,_ and for a breath all she can think about is lighting the fuel in the plane on fire and burning everything around to screaming ash.

She'd never have to see Athos’ self-righteous visage again, it's true.

But she left her favourite gloves at Ana's house, fur-lined and soft as sin. He can live until she gets them back, maybe…

  
vii  
  
Russia wasn't her fault, but it was.

Anne is a professional: she knows to be wary at an exfil point. But this time she wasn't wary _enough,_ pulled out of the queue without ceremony, black-bagged and tossed in a van.

She fucked up, she didn't see the warnings: that's on her.

Of course she breaks, in that dark little building in the heart of winter. Everyone breaks in time. Crack on the surface - give a little, give a lot - they might let you go with the core of you intact.

But, but her torturers don't want anything they don't already _have_ her name her mission her employer… it doesn't make sense and the dangling end of it infuriates her. But it doesn't stop either, the hands and the pain and the - a piece of meat dangles in a dark house worried at by dogs, it isn't _her,_ not truly. The storm rages outside; inside Anne there is untouched snow, that is all.

  
  
viii  
  
D'Herblay's been carefully trained, she thinks. Combat medic he might be, but there is nothing rough about his tending her wounds in a shabby safe house still in the heart of Russia.

He holds himself still, neutral, discussing everything he is going to do, anywhere he might touch, and stops when she tells him to stop. He is punctiliously cautious of the trauma victim's boundaries. She wishes he wouldn't: the body is _meat,_ uncaring; Anne is _snow,_ unbounded, unmarked, pure in its starkness. Best get the minutiae over with.

 _Superficial_ is the verdict, the abrasions, the cuts, the burns all skin deep.

“Your biggest problem at present is mild hypothermia,” he tells her calmly, ignoring the curl of her lip, “and general shock.” She is snow inside, yes, untouched, inviolate, winter.

Then he asks, “Are you on any hormonal or implanted birth control?”

“They used condoms,” she says.

“Can you swear none of them broke?” At her silence he removes a plastic baggie holding a single tab of EllaOne from his medical satchel. It's sized to her bodyweight - the medic thought ahead, smarmy, intrusive bastard that he is. She wants nothing but stark snow inside her and he is trampling it: no-one should know this much about her. “Have you experienced any irregular menstruation in the last year?” After a few careful queries he hands her the pill and another cup of warm water, wanders vaguely away for privacy, and she begins to loathe the man.

“Ana still loves _me_ better,” she tells him, coarse as a crow and wanting only to draw blood.

He turns and bows slightly in a courtly, antique gesture, neutral and unruffled, clear as an iced lake that skaters might dance on.

“I'm going to report to Athos,” he tells her, the only crack in him a tiny hitch in his stride. (Old injury playing up in the cold?) “Rest if you can.”

 

x

She near laughs in their faces when they suggest it might be Queen behind the security leaks, the botched operations, _Russia._

No. The woman simply doesn't have it in her.

Treville, now, _there's_ a twisty old screw pretending to be an honest man. Anne has suspected Treville of more crooked dealings over the past years... near as bad as late, unlamented Richelieu, is Treville. She's going to enjoy kicking his door in _so very much._

And then she is going to take Athos’ words and make him eat them.

It isn't Queen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // _a single tab of EllaOne inside_ \- I did some basic research on emergency contraception pills. EllaOne (or Ella, depending on the country) is more effective than Plan B but requires a prescription, hence Aramis checking Milady's general health. (Neither will affect an already fertilised ovum, by the by - the abortion pill is an entirely different compound.)
> 
> // Looks like this is a three-parter, folks. Ending soon!


	3. The Black Wood and the Snow

xi  
  
It was Queen.

It wasn't Queen.

Anne is used to _complicated,_ it's just, it's been a long time, ever so long, since Anne was herself a mere pawn and she doesn't like it.

And she should have known, surely, about the coercion, the pressure Queen was under? Reading people is Anne’s special skill, honed over decades of survival and she _should have known_ this last year that the grinding tension in Queen's shoulders, her distraction, the desperate passion in her lovemaking, were more than just the divorce eating at her spirit.

Anne fucked up: that's on her.

So she rescues Queen’s hostages - she isn't a monster, whatever Athos might say - and decants Louis plump and whining from the horror of a year's imprisonment in a _comfortable farmhouse,_ and the boy, blinking bemused at Queen as if she were a stranger… But Anne doesn't stay, vanishing from the debrief like smoke on a winter's day.

It feels good to use her skills, to stretch her legs and walk alone.

And there is a question she never wants to hear the answer to. _Did they make you choose? Madame Queen, when your blackmailers said, “You have balked and will be punished,” did they ask who? Your husband, your son, your lover, did you decide who you could bear to have broken?_

Anne has always admired Ana for her practicality, her ability to make measured decisions. She just doesn't want to _know,_ that's all.

  
xii  
  
Consider a field of white. Blank, unwritten snow, steaming in the bitter air under a fierce blue sky.

A black tree marks it, spreading great boughs over the snow.

Look closer. The stretched out limbs that seem so graceful from a distance, so ornamental, are bent and twisted, snarls of unpruned deadwood and branches turned back upon themselves. Gashes and old burns scar the raddled trunk; twisted knuckles send fingers stretching mutely to the sky.

Nothing that survives is beautiful, if you come too near.

  
  
xiii  
  
They find her at last in the _Jardin Anne-Frank_ at the draggy end of winter _._ The little memorial park is quiet, slushes of dirty snow clogging the paths and the tiny playground. Anne sits solemnly on a black-iron bench thinking of nothing in particular. She's getting old and tired, losing her edge, perhaps.

A hand slides into hers, fine-boned, cool, and Anne startles. It's just that she hasn't been sleeping, that's all.

Queen - Ana - says, “I can't possibly.” And, “There are not words enough and so. I -”

“My hands are cold,” Anne says dreamily.

“I still have your favourite gloves,” Ana says. “In my pocket.”

“Mm. There are better ways to warm them.”

Ana startles herself, cheeks flushing a delicate pink. “Louis!” she calls to her son, then. “Do we have something to say to Ms. de Winter?”

The boy comes tripping over, russet-haired. He makes a little bow, child-clumsy but careful, and says, “Thank you, Madame.” Anne stares down at him, unblinking. He has his mother's eyes.

“Tell your mother you are both welcome,” Anne says to the boy. He smiles up at her, precocious brat, then runs behind his mother, peeking out behind her knee.

"I -” says Ana.

“I mean it,” says Anne, “and isn't that a funny thing?” She smiles crookedly at the little garden, the sodden green hedges, the dirty snow, the black trees. “I need you to be happy, that's all. So shut up and kiss me.”

They sit on the black iron bench in an uncertain spring, together, and one leans her head on the other's shoulder, and one warms her hands in the other's coat. The boy plays quietly in the garden. And on the old, black wood above them, early blossoms open. That's all.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // The _Jardin Anne-Frank_ is a small park near the _Centre Pompidou._ I couldn't find many picture references, but I'm told it's a good place to see the weeping cherries in bloom.


End file.
